


Welcome Strangers

by ohmyfae



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: F/F, F/M, Little Mermaid AU, Merman!Noctis, Surfer!Luna, slight body horror, smut in later chapters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-02 14:37:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17265989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyfae/pseuds/ohmyfae
Summary: Lunafreya Nox Fleuret is an up-and-coming champion surfer, preparing to take on a challenge that claimed her mother when she was young. Noctis Lucis Caelum is the son of the sea king, with a wicked uncle who will exploit any chance to punish the family that cast him into exile. When Luna finds Noctis washed-up on the beach one night, neither of them will ever be the same.A Little Mermaid AU, written for the kinkmeme!





	1. Chapter 1

Somewhere, all stories come true.

Somewhere, stars aren't just unfeeling specks of light in a clear sky, ignorant of the wishes that go trailing through space like scattered drops in a maelstrom. Somewhere, all old women are secretly sorceresses, princes are noble and kind, and when people die, it's hardly forever. They're only sleeping, waiting for the right kiss to bring color to their cheeks.

Somewhere, Sylva Nox Fleuret isn't dead. She's frozen in crystal, held in the highest spire of the ice queen's realm, her hands folded and lips curved in a knowing smile. She doesn't have too much rouge on her cheeks or clumpy eyeliner, and she isn't surrounded by lilies and shells and polished picture frames.

Somewhere, when Luna reaches into the open casket with trembling fingers, her mother's hand isn't cold.

There aren't many people at the beach on a Tuesday morning, but the few joggers and birdwatchers who frequent the Galahdian shore turn to watch as Luna marches out of the dunes. She's small for a twelve-year-old, smaller still in her black dress and horrible shoes, which she kicks off as soon as she clears the nettles that border the beach. The surfboard in her arms is massive by comparison, and when she sets it down to rub wax onto its surface, a small bottle slips out of her hands. She shoves it down the front of her dress and keeps working, her expression closed, her movements jerky and slow.

Then she takes off her dress and shoves it in the sand with her shoes. She's wearing a white swimsuit underneath, and when she picks up her board and walks into the foam, she doesn't look like someone who spent the last half hour running through the streets of town, her brother's voice at her heels. She looks like the kind of girl who could take up a sword or climb a tower or weave gold. A girl who believes in things like dreams, or fate, or mothers who always came home, smiling and damp from the surf, their feet covered in sand.

 

\---

 

Noctis Lucis Caelum, prince of the True Sea and heir to the jagged crown, lies on his back on the ocean floor and watches the tide roll by.

He isn't supposed to be here. He isn't even supposed to be out of his bedroom, but what's a kid supposed to do, he thinks, when there's a world full of sunlight just beyond the wall? There are great, brilliant strands of it reaching down from the surface of the waves, close enough for him to feel the warmth of it on his skin, and he doesn't even tense when he sees a shark pass overhead, its powerful body casting a shadow over his face. He swishes his tail, kicking up a cloud of sand, and a stingray emerges a few feet off. It passes him with a doleful air, and Noct smiles.

"Sorry," he says. The ray swims into the grey-green distance, seeking out quieter sands, and Noct crosses his arms behind his head.

That's when another shadow blocks the sun. It isn't a shark this time. It looks almost like a misshapen turtle, with a soft-shelled underbelly and four skinny limbs. It has fins jutting down at the back of the shell, but they don't seem to be doing anything. Noct sits up as one of the limbs reaches out, holding something above the water.

Something dark falls into the waves. Noct pushes off from the ground and swims up to meet it, hands closing around a small cylinder. He looks up, and the creature above him has slipped a hand into the water, fingers crooked.

A human. Noct's grin fades, and he curls his hands around the cylinder. A human, not even ten feet away, dumping garbage in his ocean. Well, not his ocean. Not yet. But it still counts. He swims up behind her, slowly breaching the surface of the water, and holds out his hands to tip her off her shell.

He stops.

The human--She's a girl, he thinks, by the way she covers her chest like some of the girls at home--sits on her shell, which isn't connected to her body at all, with white-blonde hair hanging loose in her eyes. Her shoulders are hunched, and her strange, gangly legs are limp in the water. She lets out a harsh breath and rubs an eye with the heel of her hand.

_Oh._

Noct ducks down for a gasp of water and comes up again, blinking in the harsh sunlight. "Did you lose something?" he asks. His voice squeaks in the open air.

The girl stiffens, and Noct goes under again. He can already see his best friend's worried, terrified face in his mind. _You talked to a human? An actual human? Do you know how dangerous that is, Noct?_ He stays under the shell, watching the human's limbs twist as she looks for the source of his voice.

She says something, but Noct isn't allowed to study human languages, so it comes to him as nothing more than booming, distorted gibberish. Then the girl starts to move, and Noct follows her, a shadow beneath her shell.

Just as the wave they're swimming through starts to crest, her limbs disappear.

Noct pushes himself forward, riding the wave as it begins to curl in on itself. The girl is standing on her shell, right limb forward, crouching as the water forms a tunnel around her. Froth and spray shoots up below them, and as the tunnel narrows, the girl holds out her hand and lets it cleave a path through the water at her side. Her fingers are close enough to touch.

Wonderingly, Noct pushes his hand into hers, and she turns to him, eyes wide. Her mouth opens and her feet slip off her shell, which goes flying out from under her. She crashes into the tunnel, into Noctis, and the two of them go tumbling head over tail into the roaring, twisting rush of the wave.

An elbow jabs Noct in the eye, and he almost loses hold of the cylinder. He keeps it in his free hand even as the girl writhes and kicks, bubbles rising from her mouth in an alarming cloud. It strikes him, suddenly, that humans can't breathe the way he can, and he takes her arm, holding her tight.

The girl stares, limbs thrashing, hair flying around her face.

"Noct?"

Noct winces. That's Ignis' voice, plaintive and just on the verge of fearful, rising from the depths. If he sees the girl, Noct knows, it'll be all over. Ignis is a great friend, the _best_ friend, but he won't be able to keep this a secret.

"Noc-tis!"

Noct gives the girl a little push towards the surface and whirls around, swimming as fast as his body can carry him towards the drop-off. When he checks over his shoulder, he can just see the girl's lower limbs below the surface, kicking softly while she clings to her abandoned shell.

"Noct!" Ignis emerges from the dark, the tentacles of his lower half curling in relief. He pulls Noct into a crushing hug. "I thought I lost you! I was on guard, I swear, but I saw this spotted porpoise, and I... I heard they can jump over the water, like a whale, and I..."

"It's fine," Noct says. He sighs. Leave it to Ignis to get distracted by a _porpoise._

"What's that?" Ignis asks, looking down at the cylinder. Noct draws it close, tucking it under his arm.

"Nothing," he says. "Just a... a thing I found."

"Not a human thing?" Ignis asks. Noct shrugs a shoulder. "What? Noct, your father--"

"Isn't gonna find out," Noct says, swimming out of Ignis' vise-grip. He glances back behind him, grinning slyly, and winks. "Because there's nothing to find out."

Ignis moans. "You'll get me exiled one day," he says. They disappear into the dark, leaving the sun, the waves, and the strange, mournful human girl behind. "Just you wait."

 

\---

 

Bare feet pick along a pile of rubble jutting over the sea, the stone surface worn rough with the constant crash of the waves. Lunafreya Nox Fleuret holds a small bottle in one hand, her flip-flops in the other, and her long hair is already slipping loose out of her tie. At twenty-four, she’s nowhere near the height of the rest of her family, but her arms are wiry with muscle, and there’s a squareness to her jaw that journalists are always quick to point out.

 _You even look like her,_ they say. _What would your mother say if she could see you now?_

Luna looks out over the sunlit ocean. Dawn is breaking, washing the water with streaks of pink and orange, and the waves are just swells, rolling hills that shift and sink and reappear, caught in an endless cycle. She sighs and takes a long, heavy breath.

Behind her, a car horn blares. Luna twists around to see a white-haired woman lean out of the rusty van in the parking-lot, a slash of red for a mouth. “Luna! Move your flat ass and get back here, or we’re going home!”

Luna raises a hand in a mocking wave, and Aranea Highwind flips her off. Luna turns back to the sea and slips down the last few feet, where a groove in the rock sits just out of reach of the high tide. There’s a stone there, bright blue with a perfect hole in the middle, and when Luna picks it up, the warmth in her fingers leave white marks on its surface.

“Thank you,” she says.

As usual, no one answers. She crouches down and places the bottle where the stone had been, and watches the waves for a minute. “I’m taking the Trial,” she says. “I’ll probably be gone for a while.”

The car horn blares again. “Get! Your ass! In! The van!” Aranea shouts.

“Please!” That’s Cindy’s voice, half-choked with laughter. “She meant to say please!”

Luna rolls her eyes and gets to her feet.

Cindy Aurum is leaning against the van when she gets back, drinking a bottle of seltzer water. She’s wearing a work jacket over her bikini, and her sun-bleached curls bob under a cap bearing the logo of her family’s garage. When Luna walks over, stumbling into her flip-flops, Cindy grins.

“Done with the good luck charm?” she asks. Luna closes her hand around the stone. “Aranea’s about to call her boys and bail. Never get that girl up before eight am.”

“At least the boys don’t drag me out to the middle of nowhere to climb rocks,” Aranea says from the driver’s seat. She hasn’t even bothered to cover up the bags under her eyes, and there’s a cigarette smashed in the cupholder beside her. “You ready, princess?”

“We won’t be late,” Luna says, and climbs into the back of the van. It smells like the ocean, like wax and wet swimsuits and sand, and Luna stretches out on the beat-up backseat while Cindy steps over her. “And stop calling me that.”

“Blame your brother,” Aranea says, starting up the van. She snorts. “Ravus, the crown prince of surfing.”

Cindy and Luna groan in unison, and Aranea steers the van out of the lot, towing Cindy’s garish yellow jetski behind them. “At least when you’re done with the Trial,” she says, “You won’t be anyone’s princess.”

Luna props her feet up on the back of Aranea’s seat. The Trial of the Gods was what had put Sylva Nox Fleuret on the map. Women surfers weren’t allowed to participate in official competitions back then, but Sylva had bribed someone to drive her to the line of hopefuls ready to take on the Leviathan, the first of the great waves in a Trial that no one had completed in over two hundred years. And she’d done it. The Leviathan killed two surfers that day, but Sylva rode through the massive, hammering spray and came out standing.

It was Ramuh that got her, in the end. Ramuh, and a brand new board that was found cracked neatly in half, like someone had sawed right through the center. Luna can still remember the look on the face of the man who’d commissioned that board, the man who’d come to their house for weeks on behalf of the Niflheim surf company, offering a sponsorship that would set them up for life. For life, he’d said.

When Sylva’s body was rushed off the beach, Iedolas Aldercapt’s expression had been grim, his trim brows lowered in concern. But it wasn’t until the board was brought out in pieces that his face truly fell. Then again, it made sense. No one wanted their boards to be responsible for the death of a legend.

Luna twists the stone in her hand, then reaches back to unlatch her necklace. There’s a handful of stones just like it woven into the hemp, all in varying shades of blue, all left on that rock at the end of the broken pier. She pulls her latest find into position and considers, briefly, the afternoon of her mother’s funeral. The round face, the wide, startling blue eyes, and a tail as black as pitch, dark as a starless sky.

Aranea punches a button on the dash, and the ancient cassette deck clicks to life, blasting a screeching guitar solo down the quiet street. Cindy pulls out her phone and stuffs headphones in her ears, but Luna doesn’t bother. She taps her feet to the beat of the drum, and Aranea twists round to wink at her before she turns back to the road, belting out the lyrics as they make their way around the island, heading for the Trial of the Gods.

Back at the pier, webbed fingers close around the bottle Luna left behind. There’s a crash of foam, and both the bottle and the hands are gone, leaving nothing but a small stone on the rock, its polished surface the color of a midday sky.

 

\---

 

“You can’t keep doing this,” Ignis says, as Noct darts under his reaching tentacles. “Your father really will have my head if he catches us.”

“Oh, come on,” Noct says. He ducks through the hole in the wall overlooking his father’s kingdom, and emerges into the warm glow of protective border lights. Ignis squeezes through after him, scowling. “It’s nothing serious. Don’t ink yourself over it, Iggy.”

“Don’t—“ Ignis’ face flushes, and his tentacles draw up in outrage. “I haven’t done that in—“

“Months?” Noct asks, baring his teeth in a smile. “Weeks? What was it last time? You’d gone after that whale, right, because it had a stripe on its tail, and there was a tiger shark…”

“I wasn’t—“ Ignis closes his eyes for a breath. “You’re deflecting, Noct. This isn’t about sharks and whales, this is about humans.”

“Keep it down,” Noct hisses, swimming along one of the tube-like paths leading to the palace. All around them, the squat houses of the outer city give way to high buildings shaped like coral and twisting shells, lights strung between them like a network of stars.

“Humans,” Ignis continues, lowering his voice, “that you’ve been communicating with for years.”

“Hey, I haven’t told her a thing,” Noct says. “And you’re the one who taught me how to read in human.”

For a second, it really does look like Ignis is about to ink himself, but he recovers quickly, smoothing his face to stillness. “A valid point,” he says, “but in my defense, I was nine.”

“And ten. And eleven. And nineteen, that time you helped me get that sapphire from the wreck out by—“

Ignis holds up his hands in defeat, and Noct cackles. They swim in silence along the tube as the ocean floor rises, and Ignis is almost smiling by the time they reach the gates of the Citadel, the seat of King Regis’ throne.

Where Gladiolus Amicitia is waiting for them.

Gladio crosses his arms, which are tattooed with the wings of an osprey, and raises one brow. While his tail is a bland and ordinary grey, it’s easily a good three feet longer than Noct’s, and powerful enough to knock out a shark if needed. Gladio’s hair floats long about his cheeks and shoulders, dark and luxurious, one of his many vanities. For the shield of a future king, Gladio can be more than a little focused on his looks sometimes.

“Your dad’s looking for you,” he says, and Noct shoves his bottle at Ignis, who hides it in his tentacles. “I tried to stall him, but he ain’t happy. You got a cover story?” Ignis and Noct glance at each other. “Better come up with one fast,” Gladio says, and turns, his enormous tail swirling up a current of its own. “Cause I’m supposed to take you to him the second I see you.”

Noct covers his face with a hand, and Gladio reaches out to rub his back. “Sorry, Noct. Orders from the big guy.”

They drift through the gates, passing by high statues of every king and queen since the founding of the throne. One statue is missing, little more than a foot and some rubble that no one’s bothered to haul away, but the message is still clear: Noct feels their unseeing gazes on him as he swims by, the weight of their judgment on his shoulders. One day, his own statue will stand there, staring down at his grandchildren and great grandchildren as they too wonder if they’ll ever be worthy of the crown.

Noct spares them one last glance before he enters the circular entrance hall of the Citadel, where his father sits on the high throne overlooking the kingdom, wreathed in power and cloaked in the strength of the seven seas, ready to lay down his own judgment in their stead. Noct can only hope, as he swims between Ignis and Gladio, that whatever his father thinks he’s done, the bottle in Ignis’ keeping has nothing to do with it.


	2. Chapter 2

There is something to be said, Noct thinks, for the royal family's ability to take three minutes just to say good morning. It's a manner of speech that comes easily after twenty years of bowing and smiling and rethinking every word in his vocabulary, but the real meaning lies in unspoken cues, in subtle glances or the glimmer of a smile.

Noct and his father go through the complex dance of formal speech between a prince and a king, until King Regis' eyes soften, just a little, and he raises a hand.

"I know," he says, abandoning etiquette to address Noct personally, "that it is hard, living in the shadow of the Wall. I have spoken to the Council, and it is agreed that you will begin training with basic weapons and hand-to-hand combat." He smiles at Noct, and Noct forces himself to smile back.

Usually, this would be a momentous concession for King Regis to make. Noct hasn't been allowed to so much as touch a blade his entire life. The guards who watch the training grounds are explicitly ordered to turn him away. He's the first prince in nearly three hundred years not to serve on the Kingsglaive, the elite force of soldiers who keep the peace beyond the capital city. He is, in many ways, more of a symbol than a man: A living sign of the peace Regis has maintained, a prince trained in diplomacy, prized for his compassion. Every now and then, Regis dusts him off and parades him out for the people to admire, but it leaves Noct feeling like a doll on a shelf, waiting for his turn to be useful.

It would be awkward, then, if Noct were to admit that he's been secretly sparring with Gladio since the age of nine.

"Thank you, your majesty," he says, bowing low. "I'll try to make you proud."

"You always do," Regis says.

Noct heads back to his room without a word, only just remembering to retrieve the bottle from Ignis at the last minute. He slams the door shut, never mind that Gladio's going to want to make a game plan on how Noct can act like an amateur with a blade, never mind that Ignis is hovering awkwardly by the door, and swims to a panel in the roof of his bedroom. He had it set up in secret with Ignis and Gladio when they were kids, and the shoddy workmanship of their youth has been patched over time, making the small room above look like a sunken ship on the verge of collapse. Noct takes a breath before he rises into a bubble of air, which safely protects three shelves filled to bursting with little metal bottles. Noct props his elbows up on the stone slab beneath them and twists open his newest find.

His fingers leave damp spots on the crisp white paper as he gently unrolls it, revealing thin, spidery handwriting over a glossy sticker of what Noct thinks is supposed to be a car. He holds his breath and skims over the page.

"My friend," it says. "Aranea, Cindy and I are going to the first Trial today. It's on the other side of the island, where the cliffs make a wind tunnel under an old shrine. My mother used to say that if you shout your name into the tunnel, you're supposed to hear the name of your true love echoed back to you. Funny, isn't it? Cindy says that if she hears her own name, she'll go ahead and marry herself."

"The last stone you left was still warm. Were you there? Sometimes I think I'm imagining you. Please, Gods, I hope you aren't just someone who lives down the street."

"Whoever you are, though, wish me luck!"

Noct looks up at his collection of letters. Over ten years, and she still isn't sure if he's real. She doesn't even know his name, but Noct knows all about her. He knows about the day she met Cindy. The weeks of disastrous swimming lessons that followed. Her first big wave. Her brother's contract with the Niflheim surf company. Her own fear, scribbled hastily in the margins of letters stuffed any which way into their bottles, that something about her mother's death felt wrong, that her family really was cursed. How every time someone calls her the new Sylva, the princess of surfing, the oracle of the waves, a small part of her considers running off.

But she doesn't, because sometimes, a kid will come up to her with the same look she used to reserve for her mother, all awe and reverence, and she knows she can't stop. Not when they're watching.

Noct fits the paper back in its bottle and carefully adds it to the shelf. He can understand what she means, in his own way. Sure, the burden of the crown is heavy enough to send him out beyond the Wall, but there are times when Noct is volunteering, or working a gala, or taking his father's seat on the Council, and everything seems to click into place. It's not that he necessarily likes being prince, not all the time. But he's good at it, and when he can see his work turn into something tangible, he knows that it's worth the trouble.

He sinks back under the panel, gasping, and closes it tight. This afternoon, Luna is going to take on the first wave in the Trial that killed her mother. Will she be doing it alone? Who will be there to watch her, when the official competition isn't due to start for another week?

Noct runs a hand through his hair and checks the clock spinning over his bedside lamp. If he hurries, he might be able to make it around the island and back before anyone even notices he's gone.

 

\---

 

"I can't watch," Aranea says.

"Oh, it isn't so bad," says Luna.

They're standing at the dock by the Leviathan cliffs, taking down Luna's board while Cindy tries to get her jetski off the trailer. Her biggest obstacle in completing this simple task lies in the eager, slightly desperate faces of what looks like half a wedding party, who are jostling each other as Cindy urges them to back away.

"Is that yours?" a man asks, adjusting his purple bow tie. Aranea looks directly at Luna, shoves an arm through the van window, and starts rooting through the cooler.

"I love your hair," says a woman in a lavender bridesmaid's dress.

"Aw, ain't you sweet," Cindy says. She smiles, cheeks dimpling, and someone in the back of the crowd sighs.

"Piranhas," Aranea says, and pulls out a can of soda. She raises her voice. "Hey, hot stuff, you want something to drink first?"

Cindy's crowd of admirers turn their hungry gazes to Aranea as Cindy beams. They take in the black, strappy swimsuit showing under Aranea's tank top, the chunky sandals with enough metal at the heel to break bone, and her impressive glower, full of twenty-six years of concentrated disdain. One or two start to edge away.

"Nah," Cindy says, oblivious to everything but the task in front of her. "Thanks, though."

Aranea stares at the crowd and cracks open the can. One of the men visibly flinches.

"Please don't kill anyone," Luna whispers, but her voice must not be low enough, because the crowd is already starting to break apart. Aranea takes a step forward, and they scatter like minnows before a shark, rushing back to the pavilions further up the beach. Luna heaves her board under an arm and follows Aranea to the dock.

Aranea leans down to face Cindy, one arm braced on the railing. "Sweet girl, you gotta start telling people you aren't interested."

Cindy blinks. "They were just bein' friendly," she says. Aranea pinches the bridge of her nose, and Cindy reaches out to brush her forehead with her fingers. "Don't you worry about me, darlin."

Aranea turns aside. "Yeah, well."

Luna wades into the water to hook up her board on the back of the jetski, and smiles at the faint pink tinge at the back of Aranea's neck. "So you do care," she says.

"Someone's got to," Aranea mutters, and Cindy laughs. Cindy twists in an attempt to kiss Aranea on the cheek, but misjudges the distance and goes over, collapsing into the water with a yelp.

"If this is how you act now, gods know how you'll be during the party tonight," Aranea says. Luna shoots her a dark look, but Aranea is, as usual, unaffected. "Of course there's a party, princess. What kind of a friend am I if I can't get us some cheap beer on short notice?"

"You paying?" Cindy asks, rising from the water like a sailor lured to the rocks by a siren song.

"This time," Aranea says, and Cindy whoops.

"Then what the hell are we waitin for?" Cindy cries, scrambling onto the jetski. "Let's catch our girl a wave!"

Cindy Aurum has always been a creature of the sun, and it shows. For a girl who couldn't even dog paddle five years ago, the mere sight of sunlight flashing on a massive wave makes her sit up and shout, her voice rolling over the water as the jetski roars upthe first swell. Luna hangs on and laughs as they pass through the tunnel, Cindy's name rocketing off the stone walls, and they reach the coral bed that hastens the largest waves on the island.

"Look at that baby!" Cindy shouts, or something like it, as they veer up and around the wave. They clear the impact zone just before it breaks, and Luna and Cindy both cry out on the way down. A second wave is forming, and Luna only has a minute to drop in. Cindy let's her off as close as she can manage, and Luna frantically paddles to the top of the wave, peering down at the water below. It's a warm day, and the waves look soft, gentle, even as they crash with a thunderous sound beneath her.

She drops in late. She can feel it in the shape of the barrel as it forms, the spray rising at her heels, but Luna doesn't care. This is what makes surfing magnificent: skirting the edge of danger, the wave closing in around her, riding through the primal force of the sea. For an instant, just as the barrel closes behind her, Luna can almost see her mother there, young and beautiful and clever, upending the surfing world on its head. She's never felt closer to her than she has in this moment, and Luna knows now that she'll never go back from this. She won't stop with the Leviathan. She'll--

The barrel begins to close, collapsing in on itself too soon.

"Oh, hell," Luna whispers. She doesn't have time to think. She definitely doesn't have time to break through the wave, not now, not when she's practically surfing through foam. She ducks down on her board, sends out a hurried prayer, and bails.

The first few seconds after a wipeout are always the worst, but it's doubly so, Luna knows, when there's a reef involved. It's no good trying to keep a sense of direction--all Luna can do is cover her head with her arms and ride it out. Her board snaps free and goes tumbling off, floating to safety, and Luna is thrown forward, where she slams against the reef, all the air bursting from her at once. She tries to tuck into a ball, but she hits the reef again. The green waters of the Leviathan go grey. Unthinking, she sucks in a lungful of water and kicks off, struggling for the surface, only to find that another wave is bearing down on her.

Then, just as the wave threatens to break, arms wrap around Luna's middle.

She's never moved so fast in her life. Her feet slip against something rough, with small, sharp ridges--the skin of a shark? No, the scales are wrong. She squints and sees a flash of midnight black before she's thrust into the open air, coughing up saltwater and banging her sore shoulder against smooth, worn stone.

A hand holds the back of her head, tenderly, fingers digging into her wet hair, and Luna looks up into a face blurred by the water that lingers in her eyes. She blinks hard, but pain makes her wince, and she hears a voice above her, low, soft.

"Luna," they say. A man's voice, with a strange accent. He can't quite say her name right--it comes out like "Loh-na," more of a sigh than a word. But it's still her name, and it echoes in the tunnel, a chorus of whispers. Luna.

Luna looks down, and can just see the twitch of a massive black tail by her legs, which are still submerged while the--while the man--holds her up on a small shelf of rock. Luna tries to focus on his face, but he's too busy examining her shoulder. The hand that gently runs over her swelling muscle is webbed, a thin membrane stretching between his fingers.

"Are you--" Luna begins.

"Luna! Luna, babygirl!"

The man ducks down, arms sliding along Luna's legs to hold her up underwater, as Cindy's jetski sputters and growls towards the tunnel. "I'm right here!" Luna shouts. "I'm fine!"

"Aw, hell, I thought I lost you!" Cindy wails, and as she drives into the tunnel, the arms holding Luna let go. She clings to the stone just long enough for Cindy to reach her, and lets her friend drag her onto the jetski.

"Cindy," Luna says, her voice too high for her own ears. "There's a man under there."

Cindy stares at Luna, sitting behind her with a swollen shoulder and blood trickling down the back of her head, and nods.

"Uh huh."

"No, I know how it sounds," Luna says, "but there's... He was there. He said my name."

Cindy keeps staring.

"Baby," she says at last. "You know I love you like a sister."

"For gods' sakes, Cindy!"

"Let's just get your board and go back," Cindy suggests, and, before Luna can jump into the water and look for the man herself, grabs Luna's one good arm. "Oh, no you don't. Leave your dream man to the concussion where he belongs."

Luna groans in frustration, but Cindy just glares her down. Cindy is the only one, other than Aranea, who can get her to settle when she's in a mood, but Luna still looks back all the same, searching for a dark tail in the water, for a voice that calls her name like a prayer.

 

\---

 

"You were seen," Gladio says. He's waiting at the edge of the Wall when Noct wanders through, still dazed by his tumble through the waves. He can feel Luna's hair in his hands even now, the smoothness of her skin, the warmth of her. He'd never been so terrified in his life, that moment when Luna crashed against the reef, but when he had her in his arms, and felt the heat of her gaze on him--

"Noct," Gladio says, in a slightly desperate tone. "You don't get it. You were seen."

Noct looks up at Gladio. There's a beaded necklace dangling low on his pecs. Luna had been wearing a necklace, too, with the stones he'd given her woven into the rope. They made her eyes look like a shallow sea.

"Noct, they've been tracking you for weeks," Gladio says, taking his arm. "Your dad's been trying to give you an out, but he had your room searched, and Ignis says they found the--"

"They what?" Noct asks, thrown out of visions of Luna whispering his name. Gladio grimaces as Noct shoots past him, swimming for the Citadel. For all that Gladio has strength on his side, Noct is all speed and grace, and he's well ahead of his shield by the time he reaches the Citadel, where his father--Gods, where his father is holding--

"No," Noct says. Bits of paper float around his father as, one by one, he rips apart each bottle Luna had left for Noct since their first meeting. Ink melts and smudges, forming a faint cloud as the pages run and bleed and tear apart. Noct grabs at one, and it crumples in his fingers.

"Oh, gods," he says. "Don't be the one for her mother. Dad, stop, Dad." He grabs at the canister in his father's hands, but it's too late. Water rushes in, ruining the pages Noct has preserved for so long, and Noct looks up into a face torn between fury and terrible grief.

"You let yourself be seen," Regis says, in a voice that shakes the very water around them. "You kept a correspondence with a human--"

"She didn't know," Noct says. He can't seem to breathe. It's like the words of Luna's letters have flowed in through his gills, choking him. "She didn't know who I was."

"She?" Regis says. "A woman? Do you think yourself a siren, Noctis? One of our uncivilized ancestors, drawing their deaths to our door?"

"No, Dad, she isn't--"

"I gave you a chance to comport yourself with the dignity befitting a prince," Regis says. "And yet you continue to lie to me. I take no pleasure, Noctis, in what I must do."

Years of training with Gladio take over as a shadow crosses Noct's shoulder. He ducks just as a Kingsglaive soldier closes in on one side, flanked by another, their faces stony and unforgiving. "So you're locking me up?" Noct asks. "Putting me under house arrest until I take the throne?"

"Until you come to your senses," Regis says, "and put the good of your people over your own whims."

Noct looks up at the scraps of paper drifting in the current. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Ignis, surrounded by Crownsguard, his tentacles curled tight around each other. There's a gleam of metal in the mess of tendrils, and Noct silently thanks the gods for quick-witted friends. At least one bottle remains.

"I'm sorry, Dad," Noct says.

"Are you?" Regis' voice is cold.

"Not for that." Noct takes a breath. "For this."

Then he turns, beating the water into an eddy that sends Regis and the Kingsglaive reeling, and goes racing for the Wall.


	3. Chapter 3

In Noct's life, there've been many spots on the map that have been listed as off-limits. Like the arena. The main market square. The underground arcades. Ninety percent of the ocean. For the most part, Noct has found that what's stopping him from pushing those restrictions is just a weak and tenuous trust in his own common sense, which has, apparently, been shattered for weeks. But there's one spot that even Noct hasn't tried to sneak into.

Some call it the House. Others call it the Trench, or the Dark Place, or, in the case of one poor soul who, it was told, had gotten his hands on some illicit human books, Cthulhu's Spine.

Noct's father just calls it the Embarrassment.

Noct can see why. Out of the dark strands of kelp it rises, a grand statue of a man nearly three stories high, one hand outstretched, the other holding a sword that gleams with crystal. The Rose King, Ardyn Izunia Caelum, King Regis' disgraced older brother. The man who had tried to declare war on the human realm when Noct was a child, a pathetic attempt at a coup that ended with his banishment and Noct's grandfather personally seeing to the destruction of his statue.

Noct wonders, as he swims past the statue's massive tail, just how long Uncle Ardyn took to rebuild it.

He stops short as three spears, made of whale bone and topped with bronze, thrust out from a ring of kelp. The merfolk who follow them are unnaturally pale, and their eyes are wide and white. One of them has a growth protruding from her forehead, which shines like the light of a pilot fish, and her lips peel back to reveal rows of needle-like teeth.

"Get the wizard," the one with the light says, in the dialect of the Trench People. Trench folk didn't come to the city often, as the light of Insomnia tended to burn, but Noct was trained in most of the languages of his people, and it doesn't take him long to translate.

"Wizard?" He asks, in the same language. "I'm not here for a wizard, I'm--"

The spear presses to his throat, and Noct sighs, taking the spear in a firm grip. He wrenches it out of the Trench woman's grip and swings it around him in a short arc, making the others shift back.

"I'm here," he says again, "to see--"

"Your uncle!" a voice cries, and the folk around him disappear into the kelp, leaving Noct alone with his stolen spear. A smaller, but still rather substantial version of the statue glides through the dark, his black tail a perfect mirror of Noct's own, red-brown hair immaculate and tied back with bronze beads. He looks vaguely like Noct's grandfather, or his nose does, and when he smiles, there's something of Regis in his face. He bows, low and slightly mocking, ragged cape fluttering about him.

"Uncle Ardyn," Noct says. He doesn't bow back.

"Your majesty will do," says Ardyn, still smiling. "That's what these dear ones call me, in any case. Though of course your father is the one with the true title, now. How is dear old Reg?"

"Fine," Noct says. This was a mistake. He still has time-if he can--

Ardyn is at his side in a flick of his tail, so fast that Noct is almost thrown off balance. "Please," Ardyn says. "Do stay. Tell me your troubles. You are troubled, aren't you? I can see it in your face." He leads Noct on, past the field of kelp and into the gates of a garishly-decorated building. It looks like it's been cobbled together by bits of old human palaces and sections of the wall, and the effect is a little like an optical illusion, too disordered to properly find the door. Ardyn swims through one regardless, and Noct follows, into a dimly-lit hallway that branches into a dozen tunnels and hideaways. A few other Trench folk lounge there, not so much watching Noct as lifting their heads as he passes, like sharks scenting prey.

"Sit," Ardyn says, gesturing to the floor at the foot of what looks like a sunken throne. Noct remains in place as Ardyn flings himself onto the chair. "What brings you here, my prince? Come to reunite with your disreputable family?"

"You've eluded my father's soldiers for years," Noct says, taking a steadying breath. "People from the city can find you, sure--"

"And do they ever," Ardyn mutters.

"But I don't think a few spears can shake off the Kingsglaive. Not for this long. I want to know how you did it."

Ardyn raises a brow, and his hand goes to a stone dangling on a cord around his neck. "Why in the name of all the seas would I tell you that?" he asks. "You, the son of an usurper?"

Noct grits his teeth. He can feel the weight of stares at his back, Ardyn's people sizing him up. "I may," he says, "need some privacy of my own."

"No," Ardyn says, in a cry of delighted disbelief. "You as well? What did you do? Spit on your grandfather's grave? Show an ounce of spirit? A grain of free will? Go on," he adds, and the stone in his hand pulses with an unsteady light. "Speak."

Noct blinks.

"Oh, no," Ardyn says. Noct blinks again. Ardyn isn't on the throne anymore. He's only a few paces away, leaning against a pillar, his cape flung over one shoulder as though he's posing for a portrait. Noct glances at the throne and back again, narrowing his eyes. "A human girl? Really? Shame, shame, Noctis. Those creatures are best left to their own devices."

"Wait," Noct says. "I never told you--"

"Of course, if the heir to the throne runs off after some two-legger... You are in love with her, aren't you?" he asks.

"In lo--I don't even--"

"Oh well, you will be soon enough," Ardyn says, flapping a hand. "Yes, that's it. I've decided. I'll help you, Noctis, out of the goodness of my heart, one misunderstood soul to another."

"You know what," Noct says, backing up, "I think I'll pass."

"Stay," Ardyn says, and Noct's body freezes, slowly sinking to the floor as he frantically tries to work his tail. The stone in Ardyn's hand shines like a beacon. "I am offering you freedom, Noctis. A chance to be with your lady love, whoever she is. A few days away from your father. If you can convince this fine young woman to love you as you love her--A kiss will do, I think--then you will have proven to your father that, hah, true love does cross all bounds. If, however, the woman fails to respond to your obvious wit and charm at the end of seven days, I will personally... collect you."

"Are you insane?" Noct asks, still struggling to move. "I'd never--"

"Agree," Ardyn says.

"Yes," Noct says.

"Good!" Ardyn claps his hands. "Grow some legs, then. Oh," he adds, as pain lances through Noct's tail, freeing him at last as he writhes on the floor, "and one more thing. You're already so fetching, as you are, that I don't think it's a very fair wager, all things considered. So to level the field, let's give you one little caveat."

He leans in, smiling as Noct's gills flap and stick to his skin, restricting the flow of water. His gold eyes gleam, and the stone burns his hands, skin bubbling at his fingers.

"You will be silent," he says, and laughs as Noct clutches his throat, gasping for breath. "Not a word."

 

\---

 

If there is any real magic to the world, most of it lies in the hands of the young, the bored, and the isolated. Put more than five people on one stretch of beach for half an hour, and a case of beer, a portable grill, and an ancient speaker-system will teleport into their hands. It's a skill known only to those raised without reliable cellphone reception, and Aranea is a veritable master.

"Who are these people?" Luna asks, rolling her sore shoulder as Aranea comes by with cheap beer and a plate sagging with nachos. Luna takes one, trying not to let her internal judgment of the neon orange cheese show, and watches Cindy at the fire.

There's always a fire at these things.

"You know me," Aranea says. "I got contacts." She sits in the sand next to Luna, looking up at her sidelong. "How you holding up, princess?"

Luna shrugs and winces. "A little wounded pride," she says. "And there was the whole..."

"Man in the water," Aranea says. She leans over to crack open Luna's beer for her. "Yeah, I heard. You think it's that kid? The one who..."

"You don't have to humor me," Luna says. She sighs, looking out over the dark ocean. "I know how it sounds."

"I don't care how it sounds," Aranea says. Luna stares at her, lips parted, and Aranea smiles faintly. "You're the toughest woman I know, Luna. You don't flutter around like the guys at school did. First time you lost a competition? You went two islands over to sign up for the next one. You're not like those guys who talk a big game and give up as soon as it isn't lucrative anymore." She takes a sip of Luna's beer and passes it back to her. "If you told me the sky was green, I'd believe you."

"Sometimes it is," Luna says, unable to stop herself.

"See?" Aranea slaps a hand on Luna's good shoulder and gets up. "So maybe your dream boy is out there."

"Aranea," Luna says, taking her hand. Aranea's face shifts into an expression of panic.

"Oh no. I'm all out of emotion. That was it," she says.

"I've always cherished our friendship," Luna says, squeezing Aranea's hand tight.

"I'm gonna get another drink," Aranea says, and flees, ears pink, bare feet kicking up sand. Luna grins and stands, slowly making her way along the beach. There's a cold wind blowing from the ocean, and the waves are choppy and capped with foam, shining in the moonlight.

She takes a sip of her beer to find it half empty. How on earth did Aranea manage to do that? Luna looks behind her, and Aranea is dancing with Cindy, one arm draped over her shoulder, a hand brushing under her chin. It's sweet, in a hopeless sort of way. Maybe in about ten years, Cindy might even get the hint.

Someone coughs behind her, and Luna almost drops her drink. It isn't the kind of cough someone makes to clear their throat--It's the hoarse, full-body retching that never fails to bring Luna back to her twelve year old self, hanging onto Ravus' arm as paramedics tried to pump the water from their mother's lungs. Luna whirls, and a dark shape rises from the foam, spitting and rasping for breath.

"Oh, gods," Luna says. She sets her drink down and runs, feet sinking into the wet sand. A young man lies on his hands and knees, dark hair covering his face, the taut muscles of his back straining as he heaves. Luna kneels at his side and slams a hand down on his back.

He coughs and twists to look up at her, and even in the dark, Luna is struck by the electric blue of his eyes.

"It's alright," Luna says, grinding her teeth together as she slips an arm under his. "Let's get you up."

The man rolls away from her, his legs curling towards his chest, and the clouds part just enough to illuminate the soft indentation of his abs, the wiry muscle of his arms, and his very bare, very naked legs.

"Oh," Luna says. "Oh."

The man inches back into the safety of the foam, still staring at Luna. It's starting to unnerve her, and she takes a step only for him to raise a hand and open his mouth.

Nothing comes out.

"Are you... Did something happen?" Luna asks. "Did someone hurt you?"

The man frowns, looking over his shoulder at the empty ocean. He nods.

"Okay." Luna crouches on her ankles, gaze fixed firmly on his face. "I'll find help. Do you have a name? Can you name the people who, uh, who pushed you?" It has to be a boat accident, surely. There's no other reason for him to be here like this.

The man taps his throat, and realization dawns. "You can't talk? Whoever did this hurt you because you couldn't call for help?"

The man shrugs, a small, what-can-you-do gesture, but Luna's having none of it. Fury boils in her skin as she calls out to Cindy and Aranea, who peel away from the party and stagger towards her, leaning on each other.

"Hey, girl!" Cindy shouts. "Aranea's just tryin' to explain what polyanual is."

"Polyamory, sunshine, you've seen the guys," Aranea drawls.

"Yes, well, have a look at mine," Luna says.

Aranea cocks an eyebrow. Cindy gasps.

"Luna," she whispers. "You caught yourself a fella."

"How many drinks--No, he was attacked," Luna says. "I think. He can't talk, so I, we had to... He needs pants."

"Yeah, I'd say," Aranea says.

"Hold on." Cindy starts shimmying out of her jean shorts. Her bikini bottom slips a little on their way down, and Luna hears Aranea whisper a curse. "I bet they'd fit. He's skinny enough."

Luna dubiously takes the shorts from Cindy and crouches down again. "Uh. Here."

The man takes the shorts with a blank look. "Cover your junk, man, nobody wants to see that," Aranea says. "Come on, Cindy, turn your virgin eyes around."

Cindy doubles over with laughter, and Luna turns as well, giving the man space. There's a faint sloshing sound, a thud, and a grunt. Another thud. The sand vibrates at Luna's feet, and she turns to see the man on his knees, legs trembling violently as he tries to work the button on Cindy's dangerously skinny shorts. They don't really hide much, if Luna were being honest, but then, she doesn't think she wants to be honest with herself just now.

She gets to her knees in front of the man and holds his arm to steady him. Again, his eyes arrest her, and she searches his face, that black hair, long eyelashes, the mouth that parts slightly as he breathes.

He raises a hand to the stones at her neck, and a word comes to her, the word that had called away the boy who threw her out of a wave, the word she'd repeated to herself, after, savoring the sound on her tongue.

"Noc-tis."

His face shifts, pain receding into an almost exuberant joy, and Luna sees him.

"Oh gods," she says, holding his shoulders in both hands, the tide rising around their knees. "You're him. You're the dream boy."


	4. Chapter 4

Walking, Noct decides, as he hobbles between Lunafreya Nox Fleuret and a blonde with an impossible accent, is the worst means of transportation ever invented. He understands why Luna keeps heading out to the water: Who would voluntarily put all their weight on two fragile, oddly-shaped limbs just to get around? Feet are worse, if possible. They’re not like fins, not exactly, but their purpose is close enough that Noct keeps trying to use them to kick off from the sand.

He’s close to passing out as it is. Two of Ardyn’s people—long-haired women who could have come directly from Insomnia—dragged Noct to the surface and threw him into the waves, letting the tide push him to shore, but it wasn’t much help, all things considered. He could almost swim the way he used to, but his new legs kept drifting apart, and every time he ducked down to breathe, he came up sputtering. It took him a minute to figure out how to breathe the air, and it still burns him going down, raw and dry.

“You gotta be kiddin, Luna,” the blonde says. Noct understands three of the words. Gotta is lost on him. Kiddin has the word kid in it, which means child or goat, so maybe she’s calling Luna childish? Or comparing her to a goat? In sounds like a suffix, but Noct can’t remember running across it in the books he and Ignis used to pore through.

All of what Luna says in response sounds like something Noct’s read before, but she says it so fast that it blends together in one massive, garbled sound. All of Noct’s vowels are wrong. Every one of them. He has to keep adapting the human alphabet on the fly, and that, exhaustion, and the pain that strikes him every time his feet touch the ground makes him slump against Luna.

“We’ll get a hotel,” Luna says, and the white-haired woman snaps out something over Noct’s head. “Don’t worry. We’ll work it out.”

They help load Noct into a car, which Noct has seen only from a distance until now, and it smells like old metal, sand, and the sickening sting of oil. The white-haired woman hands Noct a dry square of cloth, which he wraps around himself before he collapses on a couch fitted in the car floor. The blonde shoves herself between Noct and Luna and stares at him so closely that he has to lean away.

“So you’re a mermaid?” she says. “With legs?”

Noct looks at Luna in panic, but it’s the white-haired woman who answers. She’s sitting in the front, her hands on a leather-wrapped wheel. “She wants to know,” she says, in a slow, careful tone, “if you used to have a tail.”

Oh. Noct nods.

“People with tails are mermaids,” the white-haired woman says. “They’re… fairytales. Children’s stories. Myths.” Noct shrugs. Of course they are: His ancestors made sure of that, at least. “Huh. We need to teach you to write.”

Noct reaches over and slaps the side of her chair, trying to get her attention, and Luna says, “Can you write?”

 _Yes,_ Noct thinks, nodding fast. _Gods, yes._

“Let’s hope the hotel has a notebook,” says the woman in front. She twists her right hand near the wheel.

Then, without warning, the car explodes.

Or that’s what it feels like. The whole frame shudders, and Noct grabs onto loose straps tucked into the couch as the machine takes off, moving unnaturally fast in a bumping, uneven roll away from the ocean. Noct closes his eyes, which makes it worse, then stares up at the ceiling and tries not to imagine the car collapsing around him, falling apart piece by piece.

He must have passed out at some point in the harrowing journey to the hotel, because he opens his eyes again to a beige ceiling with small, shadowy pebbles in the paint, and a dry bed beneath him that sinks when he rolls to sit up. The three women huddling around a small brown table turn as he does so, their faces so close together that they look like muses in a play. Noct can’t help but smile at the thought.

“Everything okay?” Luna asks. Noct shrugs again, and the white-haired woman groans. She’s holding a square object to her ear, and she walks off into another room as Luna climbs onto the bed. Luna’s graceful even on land, which Noct knows now is pretty impressive, given humanity’s obvious disadvantage regarding the state of their legs. She’s wearing a rough lace dress over cloth shorts and a dark top, and Noct wants to hook his fingers in the loops. It’s like a net, but decorative, and Noct holds his breath as a piece of it slides over his new, soft knees.

“Here,” Luna says. She hands him a pad of paper and a pen. It’s harder to hold the pen without the webbing between his fingers, but he’s been practicing since the age of eight, and his handwriting evens out after a few lines.

 _My name,_ he writes, _is Noctis Lucis Caelum, prince of the seven seas and heir to the crown of the high king…_

 

\---

 

“I believe my uncle possesses one of the—I don’t know what this word means, it’s in another alphabet—“ Luna whispers, pacing along the edge of the hotel’s swimming pool. Aranea and Cindy are sitting at her feet, backs to a worn plastic lawnchair. Luna flips the paper on the pad with shaking fingers. “The stones from the Solheim empire, which only the royal family is allowed to touch. You should be familiar with them. I’ve already given you six.”

“Holy shit,” Cindy says. “Holy shit.”

“Don’t worry,” Luna reads, holding her necklace tight. “The properties in the stones I’ve given you are mostly gone, and they were used for protection and healing when they did work. They’re safe, and they’re my inheritance, so it was my right to give them away. Also, they bring out your eyes.”

There’s a short silence as Luna catches her breath. The cool air off the ocean doesn’t seem to be enough just now, and she turns her face away from her friends.

“I cannot ask you…” Luna’s voice is breaking. She can tell. “I cannot ask you to cooperate with my uncle’s demands. I cannot imagine tricking you into loving me so that I may go home. All I can ask is for your discretion. After the seven days, when I have gone back to face my uncle, I ask that you tell no one what you’ve seen. I’m sorry. You should be taking on the Trial, not getting involved in my family politics. You could be one of us, though. The way you move in the water—Okay, okay, you can both calm down,” Luna says, holding the pad to her chest as Cindy and Aranea grin, bumping shoulders. “His writing is strange. Formal, sometimes. I wonder what books he read to learn the language.”

“You believe that?” Cindy asks. “What if he’s just, I dunno, a naked sci-fi writer?”

“A naked writer who looks just like the man, with a _tail,_ who pulled me out of the water today?” Luna asks. Cindy sinks down and raises her hands in surrender. “I know this sounds wild, but I believe he’s telling the truth.”

“If he is,” Aranea says, slowly, “then that means he’s in a shitton of trouble. What are we gonna do about it?”

Luna looks to the window, where Noctis lies sleeping in a hotel bed, tangled up and shivering in every sheet they could gather from the linen closet. Her hands clench on the notepad. A prince. A wicked uncle. Curses and mermaids and true love’s kiss—it does sound like a fairytale, but it’s real, all of it, and so are the consequences. That stone Noct’s uncle has… It sounds like he’s using Noct to test it. Like Noct being here is just another step in an elaborate game, and when his uncle comes to collect him…

“We’ll help him,” Luna says. “I’ll help him. It meant so much to have someone to confide in, over the years. Even if I wasn’t sure he was real… but he was. He is. I can’t just leave him like this, not after everything.”

“Fuck me,” Aranea says. Luna looks at her, startled, and Aranea digs into her back pocket for a cigarette. “You two actually deserve each other. Too goddamn noble to live.”

“I’ll believe it when I see him turn into a fish-man on Tuesday,” Cindy says, flicking a lighter for Aranea, “but I’m with you, girl.”

Luna smiles, momentarily overcome, and holds a hand to her cheek.

“That’s us,” Aranea says, taking a deep drag of the cigarette. Smoke streams from her lips, rising in a spreading cloud in the darkness. “A bunch of fucking altruists."

 

Luna wakes at dawn, to the faint, familiar sound of Aranea laughing. Aranea laughs softly when she thinks no one's paying attention, in short, huffing breaths, and when Luna rolls over, dislodging Cindy's legs from her waist, she can see Aranea leaning against the bathroom counter, a hand on her hip.

"Yeah, well, we don't have magic kelp or whatever, so just try the toothpaste," she says. Noct is hunched over the bathroom sink just under Aranea's shoulder, and Luna gets a glimpse of a head of damp, messy hair before Aranea shifts, blocking him from view. She turns to Luna and smiles tightly. "Teaching Prince Charming basic human hygiene. Did you know that mermaids have two dicks?"

"Oh my gods," Luna says, rolling onto her face.

"It's like sharks," Aranea says, like an unfeeling, gleeful monster, sitting on the bed at Luna's side. "He was worried about, you know, the state of his body, so I asked some questions, and it turns out mermaids have this serious modesty thing going on. Gotta keep it all tucked inside, you know? He--" she hisses, and Luna risks a glance to find a sponge dropping from Aranea's face. Noct glowers at her from the bathroom, making a gesture with his right hand. "What?"

Noct makes the gesture again. Aranea winks, and he rolls his eyes. "Since when did you two become friends?" Luna asks. "Don't tell me you bonded over _dicks_ , Aranea."

"Hey, _we're_ friends because of the popsicle incident."

Luna looks at Noct, who is staring intently. "Don't. Tell him," she whispers, and Aranea laughs.

"Y'all, I love ya," Cindy mumbles, "but I will, and I say this with all my heart, kill all of y'all with my bare hands if y'all don't let me fuckin sleep."

Aranea coos in mock sympathy and collapses on Cindy, who squawks and clings to her like a sloth, feet hooked round her middle. "Oh, am I bothering you? Am I bothering you, Cindy?"

Luna rolls off the bed before they roll over her, and hears a thud and a squeak as they drop to the floor. Noct is watching them, grinning around the toothbrush in his mouth, and quickly turns to spit into the sink when he sees Luna.

"Sorry about Aranea," Luna says. "If she's teasing you, she likes you."

Noct washes out his mouth and scrambles for the notepad. It's full of neat, simple questions, ranging from "Do humans clean themselves?" to "How many genders do you have?" He writes, "I guessed. How is your shoulder?"

"Oh." Luna tugs down her shirt, and winces at the blooming red and purple bruise forming over her right arm. "I won't be surfing for a few days, but I'll be fine. Thank you, that was kind of you to ask."

Noct smiles, but Aranea grabs Luna by the waist, tugging her back. "We're officially up," she says. "Prompto's bringing the boat in a few hours, and Cindy says I owe her donuts. You want any?"

Noct gives Luna a bewildered look. Luna shrugs a shoulder, and Aranea peels off, beckoning them to follow.

Watching a mermaid eat a donut has to be the strangest experience in Luna's life. She and the others sit in the back of the van, eyeing Noct as he gently rips his donut to pieces, acting like, well, like a prince learning to eat with his hands for the first time. He makes it through half the pastry before he stops, and he gives Cindy a bow of thanks, placing his hand below his throat.

"If I knew we were gonna be fancy about it, I woulda brought plates," Cindy says, and Noct gives her another one of his confused, blank smiles.

They meet Prompto at the dock by the fishing pier around noon. Noct has agreed, tentatively, that there's nothing he can do but get acclimated to human life for this first day, and limps next to Luna, wincing every time he puts weight on his feet. Prompto is waiting in his makeshift tour boat, which is painted bright yellow and features cartoon moogles and chocobos along the side. He hugs Aranea fiercely and blushes pink when Cindy slaps him on the back.

"Hey, dude!" he says to Noct, when Noct gingerly steps into the boat. "Aranea says you have amnesia or something."

"He's mute," Cindy says.

"English isn't his first language," Luna says.

"He might be a myth," Aranea says, at the same time. Prompto rubs the back of his neck.

"Uh huh," he says, looking Noct over. "That's. That's a lot. Okay, well, who wants to go to paradise?"

Noct startles at that, and flips a page on his notepad. "We're going to die?" he writes.

Prompto grins. "No way, bro. Just wait and see."

Noct lurches to the side of the boat the moment it picks up speed, the nose rising above the water as Prompto steers them towards the mangrove keys on the horizon. He beams into the wind, hands white-knuckled on the edge of the boat, and Luna carefully sits next to him, sliding a hand over his. He looks back at her and mouths something, then his lips twist in a frown. He tries again, still silent, his lips forming the words with exaggerated care.

_Beautiful._

"It is!" Luna shouts. Noct's hand flexes, and he holds her fingers in a tight, warm grip. He's wearing one of Aranea's shirts, which strains at the muscles of his chest and arms, and the spray of the water has made the light fabric dangerously sheer. Luna sucks at her lower lip and looks away.

They finally slow down at a sandbar framed by mangroves, where Cindy shoves the anchor overboard and immediately dives into the water. Prompto takes out his camera and fiddles with the waterproof casing while Aranea jumps after Cindy.

"I thought we might practice walking," Luna says to Noct. "If we're in the water, it should be easier."

Noct bends down to retrieve the notepad, and flips through it. He points to a line he'd already written the night before: "You don't need to help me."

"I want to," Luna says.

"Alright!" Prompto shouts. "Incoming!" He jumps down off the boat, and water sloshes over Noct and Luna. Noct smiles wryly, gets up, and strips off his shirt.

Someone wolf-whistles--probably Prompto--and Luna wriggles out of her shorts and shirt, revealing the blue bikini she stole from Cindy in high school. Noct licks his lips.

"Let's go, then," she says, and drops off the side of the boat, thankful for the cool water rushing over her face.

Noct is just as graceful in the water as she expects him to be, rolling onto his back out of a magnificent shallow dive. His expression is blissful, and Luna almost feels guilty for leading him to the shallow part of the submerged sandbar, where they can stand chest-deep in the clear water.

"Usually," Luna says, "I'm teaching people how to swim, not to walk, so I may not be an expert at this."

Noct tilts his head in that small shrug of his and lifts a hand to Luna's hair. He twitches back at the last second, as though snapping out of a trance, and bows to her like he bowed to Cindy that morning. Luna considers ducking underwater again, just in case the heat on her face isn't just the sun.

She takes Noct's hands.

"Follow my lead," she says, just as Aranea, further down the sandbar, cries out.

"A shark!" she shouts, and Luna tenses, thrown by the panic in her unflappable friend's voice. "Everyone back in the boat! There's a shark in the water!"


	5. Chapter 5

Aranea Highwind curses as ash from yet another wasted cigarette crumbles on her thigh. The sound of the tide merges with the rising roar of passing cars, and the moon is a thumbprint of white against a blue curtain. Behind her, in the comforting darkness of her grandmother's van, Luna is sprawled out with her head on the stomach of a mermaid.

Mechanically, her hands moving with muscle memory alone, Aranea lights another cigarette.

She's always been a practical person. When she was ten, Aranea had stood in her grandmother's trailer, holding the handle of a pink suitcase covered in stars, and told her father _no thanks, I'd be better off here._ She'd written a list of reasons in her diary, carefully numbered in two different colors of gel pen, and when her father drove off an hour later, she didn't even cry.

Not much.

When Biggs told her, breathless and a little lightheaded under the bleachers of the high school soccer field, that he loved her, Aranea had laughed and told him to say it again in five years. When he did, sitting on Aranea's couch with Wedge's hand gripped tight in his, Aranea went through her options and decided that yes, maybe he was right this time.

And when Luna told her that she'd been writing letters to a mermaid, Aranea had lined up everything she knew about her best friend since the age of eleven, scribbled it out on pages and pages of notes in her bedroom, and decided that she had no reason not to believe her.

Still, it's one thing to decide your friend might have encountered some guy with a tail in a moment of grief; It's another to see a man with the lower body of a shark go racing past, cleaving a line through the water, to grab Luna's dream boy right out of her hands.

It happened fast, faster than Aranea could blink. She can still see it even now, the way Noct thrashed in the water, scrambling up the merman's body to gasp for air. Luna swimming after them. Aranea and Cindy trying to catch Luna before she got herself killed. Prompto shouting, pointing to a grey, purplish shadow in the distance.

Which turned out to be the octopus.

It was like something directly out of Prompto's twisted little fantasies, and Aranea knew it. The merman latched himself to Noct with a thud that knocked the wind right out of him, tentacles wrapping around his body in a tight, crushing embrace. Noct kept trying to talk, tapping his throat and scowling, and it was Luna who managed to call out, reaching a hand to the strange merman's shoulder.

When the merman turned, teeth bared, Aranea took off towards him, anger rising corrosive and tight in her throat. "Don't fucking touch her," she said, and Luna had to latch on herself, slowing Aranea to a crawl. "Call them the fuck off, Prince Charming."

The octo...mer... The merman with the tentacles gave her an arch look. "I am not," he said, in a thick, unfamiliar accent, "a pet to be called off. Girl."

"I'll show you girl, pretty boy," Aranea said, and Luna wrapped her legs around her waist, dragging them under for a split second. She came up sputtering.

The man with the shark tail said something, and Noct rolled his eyes. "Did one of you do this?" the other one said.

"No," Luna said, covering Aranea's mouth with a hand. "It was Noctis' uncle. He had a stone."

That went about as well as trying to put out a fire with gasoline. The one who knew the language--Ignis, he called himself--slowly let go of Noct, but kept a hand on his shoulder as they drifted towards the shallows. He and the shark man seemed to be lecturing Noct, their voices rising and clashing, tails and tentacles lashing the water. Noct just shrugged and made expansive gestures, so it was up to Luna to explain.

Badly, it seemed, because the more she spoke, the darker the others' expressions got. Gladio, the shark man, looked about ready to pop, and kept grumbling to himself in his own language. Ignis refused to translate.

When Luna reached the end of what she knew, Ignis looked Noct up and down, then spoke to Gladio. Noct stumbled back, hands upraised, and Ignis shifted towards him.

"His father home will wa--His father will want him home," Ignis said, "but he needs air to breathe..." He glanced at Gladio, who spoke again. "News of stone. News of. We need to report?" Noct shrugged. "I apologize. I need time to think of... words." He groaned. "You will keep him here."

"I live on the other side of the island," Luna said. "By the rocks, where he used to... where I left him letters. He can stay with me there, if he wants."

Noct smiled, and Luna tentatively smiled back. It was almost a little sickening. "Good," Ignis said. "Good. I will return when task is." He spoke to Noct, who threw his hands in the air. "I will return," he said again. He thrust something into Noct's hands. "Soon."

"How soon?" Prompto asked. His voice was dangerously high. Ignis gave him that slow, superior look, and a blush rose to Prompto's cheeks. "Just, uh. Curious."

"Tell no one," Ignis said. "Will find you. Gladio and I."

Gladio smiled. His teeth were unnaturally sharp. Aranea tried for a mocking smile of her own, and lifted a hand in an "I see you" gesture.

It didn't do anything, but it made her feel better, at least.

Now, in the dark an hour or so from Luna's house, Aranea hisses as her cigarette burns down to her fingers. Again. "Shit."

"Easy, girl," Cindy says. Aranea jumps: Somehow, Cindy's managed to climb onto the front bumper without Aranea catching on. She has her cap pushed down over her eyes, and she's wearing denim shorts and a matching top with ridiculous fringe at the bust. She looks like some sort of pop star who got thrown into a country musical by mistake, and when she leans down to pluck the cigarette out of Aranea's hand, her nose bumps Aranea's neck.

"So," she says. "Fish boys."

"Yeah," Aranea says. "Guess so."

Cindy crosses her legs. "Prompto sure learned somethin about himself, didn't he?"

Aranea almost grins. Prompto had spent the whole ride back grilling them on mermaids--How many there were, if they could all grow legs at will, if there were more like the grumpy one, the guy with the, the--

"Tentacles?" Cindy had said.

"I was gonna say hair," Prompto muttered, fooling no one.

"We're all learning a lot," Aranea says. "Shit, Luna's got herself some kind of sea prince as a penpal. There are shark men with Fabio hair. Stones that control people. Kings of the ocean."

"Weird old world, huh?" Cindy says. She scrunches up her nose when she smiles. When Aranea fumbles for her cigarettes, Cindy slips down off the bumper and reaches around, hand closing on the box.

"It's just going to get worse, Cindy," Aranea says. Her lips are a hair's breadth from Cindy's. "I can tell."

"Yeah, maybe," Cindy says. She tugs the box out of Aranea's pocket and lets it drop. "But we got each other's backs, don't we?"

"Of course we--" Aranea's voice cuts off as Cindy kisses her, slow and deep and with all the assurance of someone who doesn't need five years to figure herself out. She draws back with a wry smile and sits up on her knees.

"You're right," she says, tipping up her cap with a thumb. "We're _all_ learnin' a lot about ourselves, ain't we?"

 

\---

 

They arrive at the Nox Fleuret home at dawn, just as the sun creeps over the horizon to paint the ocean pink and white. Luna finds Noct sitting next to her, pressed to the window with his pen working furiously on his notepad. He stops every few seconds to look up at the water behind the house, and his eyes flicker with violet in the light of the sunrise.

"Morning," Luna says. Noct gives her a tight smile and crosses out a line. He passes the notepad to her, and she takes it carefully, well aware of Cindy and Aranea stumbling around the front yard outside, searching for the house key.

"Under the gnome!" she shouts. Noct jumps.

"Got it!" Cindy shouts back.

"One thing I'll miss about human life," the note says, "is the sun. We have mirrors that catch the light at home, and lamps from the deep, but it doesn't compare to this."

"You mentioned the deep before," Luna says. "You said some of Ardyn's people come from there."

Noct gestures for the pad and spends a moment writing, brow furrowed, as the lights in Luna's house come on.

"Too dark," he writes. "People from the deep don't feel welcome in the city. Hurts their eyes."

"And you don't have a way to fix that?" Cindy asks. Noct gives her a baleful look. "I mean, if they went to Ardyn because they don't feel welcome..."

"I know," Noct writes. "I'll change it when I come back."

Luna looks out at the ocean. "I expect you need to go back sooner than later," she says, "if your friends may be going after your uncle." Noct's hands tighten on the notepad, and Luna takes a breath. "I can kiss you," she says.

Noct blinks quickly. His lips part, almost unconsciously, and his dark lashes fly open. "If that's what it takes to go home," Luna says. "We can try."

Noct lays a hand on her arm. Luna hesitates, a small, selfish part of her holding back, wanting to let Noct stay one more morning, one more hour, and her fingers touch the smooth skin of Noct's belly. There's muscle under the surface, taut and rigid, and her nails scrape over them as she presses her lips to Noct's.

He kisses her back just as softly, lips barely parted, hands trailing up to dig in Luna's hair. Then they sit back, look down at Noct's legs, and wait.

Nothing happens.

"Maybe we should try again," Luna says, a little breathlessly, and Noct smiles as he kisses her again, drawing her down to the seat cushions. His right leg slips and he falls onto her, warm and heavy and laughing silently, and Luna drags him up for one more try just as the side door of the van slams open.

"Really?" Aranea says. "Do I need to get the hose?"

Luna rolls out from under Noct just as he scrambles back, and they both look at Aranea with twin expressions of annoyance. Aranea smirks.

"Yeah," she says. "Next time I'm definitely getting the hose." She turns on her heel and strolls off, hands in her pockets, whistling timelessly. Noct looks back at Luna with a face flushed with pink, and Luna hastily tries to smooth out her hair.

"Why didn't it work?" she asks. Noct shrugs. "You don't think your uncle... He didn't mean for it to work in the first place?"

Noct shrugs again, but despite the gravity of the situation, he still can't seem to stop himself from smiling. He gets to his feet in an awkward sort of scramble and drops to the ground. He grabs for the notepad, and as he does, Luna spots something metallic in Noct's back pocket.

She follows Noct out of the van and catches him as he stumbles over a cobblestone. They head up the path together, under Aranea's deeply amused eye, and as they reach the door, Aranea leans against the frame and looks Noct up and down.

"So," she said. "Do you try the true love's kiss routine on all human girls?"

"Aranea," Luna hisses, but Noct is shaking his head, hands up in a clear protest.

"Okay," Aranea says, reluctantly pulling back. "But here's the thing, your highness. You might be emperor of the waves or prince of the beach or whatever, but Luna might as well be my sister. One wrong move--"

"Thank you, Aranea," Luna grits out, grabbing Noct's hand and towing him through the door. "Duly noted."

"At least wear a condom," Aranea says, and when Luna whirls, Aranea is practically giggling. Luna gestures rudely and Aranea winks, holding a fist to her mouth to bite down a laugh.

Noct makes to open his notepad, but Luna stops him. "I'll translate later," she says, cheeks blazing with heat. "I promise."

 

\---

 

Luna's family home has stairs, which are a problem, but Noct barely registers this as he's guided up them and into a room painted like bleached coral, where he can quietly pick apart the last minute in his head.

Of course, rules about dating in the royal family have changed over the years. After a few centuries of careful breeding led to nothing but fin rot and blood disease, Noct's ancestors had opened the dating pool up almost indefinitely. Still, there are rules. Where others can get together and break up without a second thought, Noct has to go through the slow, agonizingly intricate steps of formal courting. He shouldn't have even kissed Luna until he'd at least polished his tail for her, but, well. He doesn't have one right now.

In the books he read, human culture seemed to place great stock on gifts. There's an undercurrent of ownership that concerns him, particularly in how men are expected to ask the woman's family if they can marry. Which makes no sense. What if both parties are men? Do they ask for each other? Who asks first? Do women have to marry each other in secret, or not at all, or undergo some sort of strange business contract to get around the social requirements? And they don't just have two genders, Aranea assured him of that, so... Noct runs his hands through his hair.

Right. Human courting rituals are inane. He needs to stick with what he knows. He needs to--

Go home, obviously. Noct's hands slide around to his face. Shit. For a good hour, he'd completely forgotten. Courtship doesn't matter when you're doomed to be dragged back to an uncle with the world's deepest grudge. It wouldn't be fair to Luna, anyways, for him to go through the Great Dance, the Siren Song, or the Joining of Hands, only to leave her forever.

Someone knocks on the door, and Noct doesn't even have time to remove his hands from his face when Cindy appears, her gold curls a tousled mess. She looks at Noct and grins.

"Uh oh. Aranea give you the shovel talk, huh?"

None of that makes sense. Cindy sits down on the bed and pats the mattress. "Come to Cindy, darlin, I'll set you right."

Slowly, Noct sits down. Cindy immediately latches onto him, wrapping an arm over his shoulders.

"She likes you," she says. "Don't worry about that. Luna, I mean. Aranea likes you too, but not like that." Noct smiles uncertainly. There are too many meanings to the word like for comfort. "You're worried, yeah? She kissed you, but you're still human, so you think she don't love you?"

Horror sinks into Noct's mind, and he jerks his head to the side to stare at Cindy, who blanches. "Aw, hell, I made it worse. No, baby. Luna thinks you're cute. You know. Attractive. Got muscles in all the right places. You have the sensitive Prince schtick down. You're dumb enough to do something reckless and get yerself all... leggified, which lemme tell you, is right up Luna's alley. She's all about bein' reckless as hell."

There's a long, uncomfortable silence.

"I mean go to her room," Cindy says. She pushes Noct's shoulder. "Go!"

Noct stumbles off the bed, shooting Cindy a last, baleful look as he goes, and limps down the soft blue hallway to Luna's room. The door is open, revealing a large bed draped in deep blue comforters, a ceiling painted like a starry night, and a whole wall of gleaming, glittering trophies.

Luna, who is sprawled on the bed in a large shirt, looks up at Noct and makes a strangled sound. "Noctis." Noct backs up a step. "Uh, no, it's fine, let me... put on shorts..."

She gets off the bed, and for a second, Noct can almost see how people can view human legs as attractive. Hers are all muscle, her calves corded and strong, and Noct takes a deep breath to steady himself. He pulls out a small cylinder from his back pocket, the last letter Ignis had managed to rescue from the king's wrath, and holds it out.

Luna freezes in the middle of shoving her foot into her pants leg, and goes over. Noct scrambles towards her, and she lunges for the letter, hands closing over his.

"You kept them?" She asks.

Noct narrows his eyes. Why wouldn't he? "It's just. I always felt a little... Strange, afterwards. Like I was writing in a diary. Which one--?"

Noct opens the seal, and Luna carefully pulls out a much wrinkled sheet of paper. She laughs. "Oh gods! This is the one where I told you about senior prom. Where Aranea got kicked out for punching Luche in the jaw..." She rolls the paper back up, her neck pink, and stuffs it in the cylinder. "Thank you for listening, Noctis. You didn't have to."

Noct holds himself still as she touches his chin with her fingers, brushing over his lower lip. "I know it was all rather sudden. The kiss. But I thought... You seemed to... How do you really..."

Before she can work herself into a spiral, Noct kisses her again, lightly, an offering. "Oh," Luna says. She smiles. "Alright, then." She takes Noct's head in her hands, and this time she's the one pushing Noct down, her strong legs framing his hips, the neckline of her shirt dangling low.

There should be lights. There should be a dance before this, one of those horribly humiliating displays that Gladio had already performed three times (to overwhelming success) and Ignis attempted once before deciding that he'd rather stay at home and sink into a hole of acute embarrassment. Noct knows all the moves, because he has to, but he's always felt a little off, knowing that he'll have to flounce in a circle while whoever he courts silently judges everything from his swimming to the polish of his scales.

Still, one thing is true. For now, as he lets his hands trail down Luna's side, feeling out the firm plane of her abs and the soft touch of her skin, everything does revolve around her. That's the point of the dance, anyways, assuring his partner that he'll be present for them, support them, possibly humiliate himself in public for them. So maybe things aren't so different on land.

Then his hand slips lower, and Luna makes a soft, urgent sound, and Noct realizes that he knows next to nothing on human anatomy. Fuck.

"You're fine," Luna says. Her breath is hot on his neck, and her shoulders shift above him as his fingers tease the ends of coarse, tight curls between her legs. "We can take it slow if you--" She looks up and goes rigid. "The door."

She climbs over Noct to get to the doorway, and Noct's hands slide down her legs. He rolls over to watch her as she pushes the door shut and turns a small mechanism on the handle, and when she looks back at him, her cheeks are flushed and her shirt has rucked up, showing off her firm thighs.

"So," she says, and Noct smiles a little at the breathless edge to her voice. "Where were we?"


	6. Chapter 6

The headboard of Luna’s bed is made of solid wood, carved with a simple groove that runs along the edge and ends with flakes of peeling gilt. It’s sturdy. Solid. It hasn’t budged from its spot since Luna was ten, even under the onslaught of slumber parties and one incident in her teens when Luna had perched on the top of it, barefoot, to paint stars on her ceiling.

Now, it thumps into the wall as Luna slams her hand onto it, head tilted back on her disordered pillows. Her feet twist in the sheets, toes curling, and her free hand is buried in Noct’s hair, clenched tight to the verge of pain, but Noct doesn’t seem to care. For all that he began the week ignorant of the human body, he’s nevertheless eager for an education, and he looks up from where his mouth is pressed to the heat of her, blue eyes hazy with pleasure.

She hardly remembers making it to the bed, let alone unbuttoning her shirt, which is open and twisted behind her back while Noct’s tongue flicks at her clit, a trick that she swears he only learned half a minute ago, his lips brushing over Luna’s fingers as she showed him where she wanted to be touched. He squeezes the firm muscle of her thighs, runs his hands beneath her to cup her ass, lifting her so he can go deeper, moaning at the taste of her. Luna bites back a cry as her body seizes, riding out the rush of pleasure as Noct pulls back, gasping, to watch. He climbs up between her trembling legs, holding her hips as she comes down, and gently lays a kiss over a sore bite mark high on her neck. Luna grabs his face and drags him up for a kiss, open-mouthed and urgent, and feels the weight of his erection slide over her belly.

“Noct,” she says. “I can take care of that…”

Noct kisses her again, then glances down, one hand slowly parting her thighs just a fraction wider than before. Luna’s heart leaps in her throat, and she rocks up to meet him, making him gasp. “Do you… know how…”

He nods—that, she supposes, is one thing that must be the same, Aranea’s helpful additions or no—and she sits up, pulling him to his knees. She backs him into the headboard, kissing his temple, his cheek, his neck, and slips off her shirt completely, letting it slide off the edge of the bed. Noct’s hands go to her breasts, and while yes, he does have as much subtlety there as a freight train in a wineglass factory, she doesn’t really mind.

When she sinks down on Noct’s length, dragging her lips down his neck as she adjusts, Noct goes rigid. She stops, examining his face, and taps his chin. “Noct?” she asks. “Do you need to stop?”

Noct shakes his head, and groans as Luna sinks further, his lips parted, eyes half closed. Luna has a sudden, unexplainable urge to slip her fingers in his mouth, and when she presses them to his lower lip, he takes them eagerly, sucking on them, putting his clever, talented tongue to use. Luna lifts herself a little, and Noct chases her up, rocking his hips into her, making her gasp with a spike of pleasure.

They don’t take much time to find a rhythm, and Luna pushes down on Noct’s tongue as he comes apart beneath her, lost in sensation. When he comes, Luna draws out her fingers and swallows the sound he makes, arms wrapped around his neck.

They collapse on the sheets a minute later, tangled in each other and breathing hard, and Noct lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses her palm. It’s a slow, deliberate movement, and Luna wonders, as Noct releases her wrist, if it’s some sort of ritual among his own people. She takes his hand in turn and kisses him back, and Noct’s brows raise, a flush settling over his cheeks. He rolls over and scrambles for his notepad.

“I should court you properly,” he writes, and Luna flaps a hand at him, rolling onto her back.

“We don’t court on land,” she says. “Not the way we used to. Besides, you could say we’ve been courting since we were young. All those letters, the stones…”

Noct searches her face for a moment, almost unsure, before he breaks into a wide, almost ridiculous smile. He climbs over her, their bodies fitting together perfectly, his legs on either side of her waist, and he bends down to gently, reverently, kiss her forehead. When he pulls away, he’s looking at her with such fondness that Luna has to sit up, pulling him down by the neck. She knows that there’s a whole ocean out there waiting for him, but with his mouth on her breast and his hands raking pink lines down her back, he’s hers. He’s always been hers. And for now, as they move together, she can almost pretend like it’ll stay this way.

 

Luna expects to feel somewhat guilty when she finally heads down the stairs before Noct, her hair still damp from a last-minute shower. But when she spots Cindy on the couch, finger-combing Aranea's hair while they watch a documentary on TV, she doesn't even blush.

"Do you have room?" she asks, and Aranea's smile softens a bit. She sits almost in Aranea's lap, cuddling close, and Aranea drapes an arm around her shoulder.

Noct stops at the bottom of the steps, looking awkward and unsure, and finally takes a spot on the floor next to Luna. He watches the screen with a curious, careful air, and cautiously reaches up to barely touch Luna's waist. She lets her hand rest in his hair, and for a minute, all Luna can hear is the rasp of his breath, hoarse and stuttering.

She blinks. No one should breathe like that, not without a reason. She sits up, dislodging Aranea, and her hand travels to Noct's neck, where she feels raised bumps just under his skin.

"Noctis," she says. "I don't mean to alarm you, but something's wrong with your neck."

Noct lifts his own hand to Luna's, frowning, and his fingernails scrape at the bumps. Luna jerks back as the skin peels away like a bad sunburn, except it keeps peeling, unfolding into translucent flaps that flutter and twitch under Noctis' hand.

Noct gasps. The flaps tremble. Cindy scrambles over Aranea, and Noct looks down at his feet and lets out a low, horrified moan.

"Hey," Aranea says. "He almost said some--"

"There's somethin' under his skin," Cindy says. Luna, who is close enough to see it, touches the outline of scales on his calves. She and Noct exchange one tense, panicked look, and Luna rolls off the couch.

"Noct," she says. "Your legs. We need to get you to--"

"Water," Noct says, and his voice is lower than Luna expects, smooth, with a hint of the same heavy accent as his friend. "My uncle may be." He seizes, gasps, and the gills at his neck stick to his skin before flapping loose again. "Using the stone."

"Which means you're turning back?" Luna bends down to grab Noct's waist. Cindy swoops in on his other side, and Aranea races for the door. Between the three of them, they manage to drag Noct through the backyard, past dunes thick with thorny weeds and long grass, and onto a stretch of sand that groans under their feet. Noct's breathing is shallow now, harsh and sharp, and he speaks in Luna's ear as they lumber into the foam.

"I'm sorry," he whispers. "I didn't want to get you involved. I should have talked to you before. Listen. Listen, there's a stone like my uncle's. It's a ring, my father's ring, my. A thing you give to your children... inheritance. When I'm king, I can use it. I can see you again."

They're up to their waists in the water now, and Noct is pulling off his clothes, ducking into the water to breathe. He grabs at Luna, holds her arms in both hands.

"I've loved you since I read your first letter," he says. Luna swallows around a dry throat.

"It sounds like you're saying goodbye," she says. "You can't just go alone."

Not yet, a small part of her begs. Not now.

"You can't come with me," he says. Something dark flashes in the water--Aranea cries out, but Luna just touches Noct's cheek, brushing aside his long bangs.

"I wish," she begins to say, before light flashes in the corner of her eye, and Noct's grip on her arms tightens to the point of pain.

She turns just in time to see the sharp, wicked points of spears jut out of the water, followed by pale, bloodless-looking humanoid creatures with heavy black masks over their eyes. The spear-holders part, leaving space between them for a middle-aged man to rise to the surface, flicking water from his wine-dark hair. He speaks, and Noct stiffens.

"Go," Noct says, and releases Luna. His tail flicks below him, whipping up a small current that pushes her a step back. "Go."

But it's ultimately useless, Luna realizes. She knows this the moment she sees the man turn his gold eyes her way, the instant his lips quirk in a smile, his hand lifted to hold up a shining stone hung on a fine chain. Luna pushes ahead of Noct and lays a hand on his chest, keeping herself between him and the line of spears.

"I won't leave you," she says, and even as the spears lower, even as Cindy and Aranea break through the swelling wave towards her, she knows that this promise, above all, is one she is not prepared to break.

 

\---

 

"Oh, dear," Ardyn says. He is lifted by a swell, momentarily towering over them, and Luna takes Noct by the arm. Her gaze flicks to the far edge, where part of a wave collapses in on itself before folding back into the slow, even rolls of the ocean. It's the same look she gets when she's surfing; A swift moment of calculation, weighing the odds before she takes the plunge. Which means she's about to do something reckless. Something that can get her killed.

The stone in Ardyn's hand shines like a small sun between his fingers.

"I'll go with you," Noct says. He pushes Luna's hand aside. "Leave the humans alone."

"But they've seen us," Ardyn says, in a tone of mock surprise. "You know the ancient rules as well as I, Noct. I may drive a hard bargain, true, but I'm not one to discard centuries of tradition."

"Go back," Noct says to Luna, struggling through the unfamiliar vowels. He twists to look at Cindy and Aranea, who are watching Ardyn's guards. "Go. He'll kill you."

"What's that?" Ardyn asks.

"They can't handle the light!" Luna shouts, and before Noct can stop her, Aranea has her hands wrapped around her guard's spear, yanking them close. Aranea grunts as a tail whips through the water, but she already has her fingers hooked around the edge of the mask, which pulls free with a sickening crack.

The guard screams and drops their spear, which Aranea snatches up. Cindy is on their left, a hand in her guard's stringy hair, and when she wrenches off their mask, they writhe and shriek in the full glare of the sun. Luna has both hands on Noct's chest, trying to push him back, closer to shore, but Ardyn raises his stone high--

And the world goes grey.

Color bleeds from the ocean, draining into the stone in Ardyn's hand. Even the sound of Aranea and Cindy's voices go dim, and Noct can feel himself being drawn to Ardyn, pulled like a magnet through the rising wave. Luna wraps an arm around his neck, and Ardyn smiles, his golden eyes the only speck of color as the waves seem to stutter and still, the tide itself bending around them, binding them.

"No," Luna says. "No, you _don't."_

And the first stone in Luna's necklace shatters.

It's a new stone, the latest one, which trembled with the frantic beat of her heart as she pulled a strange, silent man out of the foam a few nights before. It's the stone that warmed on her breast as she lay in Noct's arms, the one that still remembers Noct's touch along its surface.

Light sinks into Luna's skin where the shards of the stone fall apart, scattered patches of blue. A ribbon of dark water curls around her, pushing against Ardyn's will.

The second stone bursts. Another patch of light, another ribbon rising from the depths, a current building a wall between them. Luna raises a hand to her neck as the third stone shatters.

Ardyn frowns, and the stone in his hand cracks, just slightly, the finest line breaking across its shining surface.

Behind him, the deep blue of Luna's twisting ribbons of water rise, a small lump disturbing the frozen sea.

The oldest stone is small, slightly misshapen, pressed too tight in the enchanter's fist when it was first created. It glows with the warmth of years of being rolled in Luna's palm, of being inspected and touched and held to the light. It knows the rise and fall of Luna's breath, the beat of her heart, the sound of her voice. It has been made strong with years of whispered secrets, of early mornings standing by the rocks, of the thrill of dropping into a wave just as the pipe begins to form. This stone is as much Luna as it is the sea, and it is as powerful as its host, the magic that lay dormant stirred into something new.

Luna runs a hand through sparkling water that swirls with every color of the ocean, the light blue of a breaking wave and the green of its depths, the blackness of a drop-off and the distant grey-blue of the world beneath a wave, and the magic answers her. Ribbons of it lash around Ardyn, cocooning him like the silken strands of a spiderweb, and though he thrashes and screams and clenches his stone in his fist, soon even the light of his stone fades. There's a bloom of shadow in the mass surrounding Ardyn, then a crack, and the water collapses into the sea.

Color rushes back to the world, and all that remains of Ardyn are the few scattered fragments of his stone, tossed by the current.

Luna breathes hard, a hand on her neck. Her necklace is ragged, now, just one cracked stone on a string, and her eyes are almost wild, as though still caught in the thrall of the stone's magic. Noct touches her cheek, and she flinches, blinking at him.

"Luna," he says.

"Oh my gods," Luna whispers, and covers her face with a hand. Ardyn's guards are fleeing, diving for the deeps as swift as they can swim, but the humans drift in the waves, speechless.

"He would have destroyed us," Noct says. "All of us, below. You..." He's never been the best at words, even in his own tongue, and when he looks at Luna, he suspects there isn't a language in the seas that could explain how he feels. Not exactly. So he just takes her face in his hands, and when he kisses her, it's with a longing that threatens to shake him apart. She brushes his cheek with her fingers as he pulls away, and her eyes are bright and clear.

"You can't stay," she says. "You have to be king. I know."

"And you have to face the Trials," Noct says. "I wish I could see it. I wish I could be there when it's over. I wish--"

He kisses her again, lightly this time, his lips barely brushing her cheek. Then he pushes away from her, from that magnificent woman with magic in her blood and his heart at her throat, and dives into the deeps, fleeing the dim, straggling rays of the sun.


	7. Chapter 7

Luna's fine.

She swims back to shore, trying to ignore the way the ocean seems to swell to meet her, currents wrapping around her limbs to push her where she has to go. She doesn't listen to Aranea or Cindy, who lug great, heavy spears out of the water with both hands, shouting over the empty ocean.

She touches the stone at her neck. It's warm, like a living creature, and when her fingers wrap around it, she can hear the muffled crash of the ocean.

She leaves the back gate open, just in case.

He doesn't come back.

Aranea stays over before the Trial officially starts. She sleeps in Luna's bed, keeping the silence of the sea at bay, and doesn't comment when Luna sneaks out to walk along the beach, scouring the rocks. She makes breakfast, plays shitty punk rock on Ravus' old guitar, and gets into a fistfight at a party with a guy who ends up being Cindy's no good cousin, which nearly makes Cindy propose on the spot. It's inevitable, anyways, and Luna's the one who steals Aranea's ring size the night before the Trial.

That night, the stone at her neck _burns._ Luna hisses and throws herself out of bed, staggering down the stairs where Cindy and Aranea are drinking, watching some old black and white film Cindy swears by. They don't notice her as she slips out the back door, where she pads silently across the sparkling white sand. The moon is high, and the tides surge with it, sucking at the dunes.

Her pajama bottoms trail in the foam as she walks to the rocks, where a small silver case glitters in the moonlight. Luna catches her breath and climbs over the jagged rubble to get to it, hunched over it as the ocean laps at her feet. She picks up the case and twists it open.

"I heard that's how humans do it," says Noct. Luna staggers. Noct is climbing onto the rocks behind her, dressed in a fine black suit made sodden by the sea, with gold chain hanging from a cape around his shoulders. His feet are bare, and a black ring shines on his hand, set with a white stone.

It's twin lies in the case, a band of black metal against a stone shaped like a crescent moon. Luna lifts it out.

"Dad took some convincing," Noct says. He smiles faintly, swaying on his new legs. "But that ring can take you anywhere. Even to the Citadel. And I'm... I'm yours, if you'll have me."

Luna stares at him. Slowly, she steps over the rock jutting between them, and reaches for his hand. His brows lower as she folds his fingers over his ring, and his smile fades.

"You're supposed to put it on," she says, and holds out her hand. Noct beams. He fumbles the ring onto her finger, and for a moment, the sea seems to shine, just as it had when she'd wielded the stone about her neck. She twines her fingers around Noct's, admiring the glint of the moon off their rings, and draws Noct in by the collar.

"Yes," she says, and Noct smiles into her kiss, saltwater dripping off his hair like tears. "Yes. I'll have you."


End file.
